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I just updated to kubuntu 11.10 a couple of months ago, and am annoyed that it's now almost impossible to highlight more than one item in Dolphin to move to and from the notebook over the network. It's problematic because I'm using that computer as a media center and the keyboard is usually on a shelf.

I wonder if that's fixed? Probably not, but then it's not a Linux or Ubuntu issue, but a KDE issue.

As to the kernel itself, I've never experienced any bugs in it at all (not that there may be some, of course).

I'm frustrated with Dolphin - regardless of distro. It's almost right but then it always has one little frustrating annoyance or another. I've switched to using Krusader on my non-Kubuntu systems (there's a back end bug that fails to copy some files properly on really big large number of files moves, like when I drag and drop my music collection but only on Kubuntu). It took me a while to warm up to it, but Krusader really makes file management easy for me, especially after I start setting bookmarks and I got used to sliding tabs from one side to the other.

I spent a year waiting for the kernel dev team to realize that Elan touchpads weren't on their list of magic knock responses. A year with the touchpad acting like a PS/2 mouse -- every slight tap was a click, no typing / palm detection, no scrolling. There were a lot of other bugs, but those were mostly driver bugs.

(Still better than Win7)

And thank you, person responding, to say that I should have spend $500 more to get a Linux-powered laptop. I appreciate that.

I have the same problem with ALPS touchpads. Apparently a developer has written a patch for 11.04... but Dell's latest version is 10.10 that I've seen (I just tripped over a Dell-branded ISO for 11.04 possibly, but I've not checked it out yet).

Debian Stable is behind the times, yes. But there is also Testing and Unstable branches.

Don't let the "Unstable" namesake fool you- I've run it for over a decade and have only had the same amount of trouble that I've gotten from other 'mature' distros. Ubuntu and Mint are both based on the Unstable branch, as most of the other "Debian derived" systems are.

Debian still happens to be "oldschool" enough to where you can start with the base install and build whatever system you want. It's not as "prepackaged

Currently I am. The main problem I have now is that they also messed with Compiz (or rather, updated it to an unstable version), causing it to randomly crash on me if I'm using it outside of Unity. (Plus Gnome 3 imitating Gnome 2 isn't quite the same thing as Gnome 2... doesn't show all the notification icons I used to have, for example.)

Just about everyone agrees that Unity is awful. Personally I like Gnome3 a lot, but Ubuntu's implementation suffers badly because they put all their resources into Unity. Mint 12 has a somewhat better implementation, which is what drove me from Ubuntu after using it for 6 years.

if you don't like gnome 3 or unity, you don't have to jump ship simply to change desktop environments. the ubuntu community produces decent xfce (xubuntu) and lxde (lubuntu) variants we use xubuntu instead of ubuntu now.. and since lubuntu's release, lower-end hardware has been getting that instead of xubuntu. either variant's desktop can be installed on an existing ubuntu install without reinstalling the whole thing.

I don't have any problem with you switching distros for any reason, but wouldn't it be a little more constructive to at least have a LOGICAL and VALID reason? In 12.04, as for any version since a long time ago, you can just install the xubuntu variant, or (not QUITE as clean) just apt-get install the xfce desktop environment. It just isn't so that with the release of 12.04 you will be "forced" to either use gnome3 or switch distros.

PS - I'm not a ubuntu guy myself (I don't particularly like any of the debia

Also, KDE causes some troubles by sticking its menus into Xfce. I just installed a pure Xubuntu machine and it works great. I plan to do the same for 12.04 when the Xubuntu image comes out. I also do Slackware, and installing Slackware without any KDE gave me a clean Xfce, too (I call it Xlackware).

Ubuntu Beta 1 is not released yet and will not be released until posted to ubuntu-announce [ubuntu.com]. Until then we might pull the images if we find problems.

This slashdot story is also weirdly linking to the wrong server for Ubuntu, cdimage has only DVDs and other obscure images for Ubuntu, almost everyone will want the CDs. You can find the link to those on the release announcement when it is posted.

as Linus is on the warpath this week, I think he should shoot whomever came up with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Beta 1So tenths aren't enough we must go to hundreds then have abbreviatiations and silly names and then Beta (isnt that what the 0.0X is for?) and the cheery on top, "1". Ubuntu has jumped the naming shark

A great deal of OSS has this problem. And the more it is pointed out the more smug all of the developers get at coming up with ridiculous names.

And before anyone says it is just a bit of fun - it isn't when you are trying to search for support documents and have to letter-by-letter- the release name (not everyone uses the numbers all of the time) or type in silly random names to get things up from the terminal (sudo nautilus - which I have to letter-by-letter every time I want it because it is so unmemo

as Linus is on the warpath this week, I think he should shoot whomever came up with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Beta 1So tenths aren't enough we must go to hundreds then have abbreviatiations and silly names and then Beta (isnt that what the 0.0X is for?) and the cheery on top, "1". Ubuntu has jumped the naming shark

Actually, Ubuntu naming is pretty easy.

12 - the last two digits of the year, 2012.04 - the month to which it is to be/was released (in this case, April).

I don't know if it's because of Unity, in spite of it, or unrelated to it, but according to this source [dzone.com], Linux desktop usage is up 64% in the last hear. I really hope Unity isn''t driving people away.

Here is the announcement from Kubuntu [kubuntu.org] that confirms we will carry on for 12.04 and thereafter just as we did before. There are other sponsors of Kubuntu besides Canonical and a thriving contributor community.

Congratulations. If you fix the file copy truncation errors that only happens with the KDE back end - and then at unpredictable intervals, you fix the fact krename got broke a couple of versions back and stayed that way even through the next package update (AMD 64), and as a nice touch make ZSNES work I might stick around.

As it stands I'm using the good old fashioned Midnight Commander to manage large file copies now because Dolphin, Krusader and Konqueror can't be trusted to do them properly. That's fin

I never stopped using Debian on my servers. Debian Stable for the win.

For desktops and especially for laptops, I'm still (sigh) on Ubuntu. To think that I used to look forward to each release!

I recently had to set up a laptop. First I tried Linux Mint, because I like their attitude toward the users. (You liked GNOME 2.x? Here's MGSE, here's Mate, and here's Cinnamon.) However, I was unable to build using Clang, because the linker would fail (something not quite set up right with the C library). Secon

Unity was pretty buggy when it was first released but you could say that about practically every piece of OSS that's ever been released. It's since matured quite a bit, and if you like a tablet-style interface for your desktop (or just something a bit different from whatever version of Windows is popular at the time), what's wrong with it?

Kubuntu doesn't need funding to continue on existing, that's up to the community and the package maintainers. If they dry up and disappear than maybe it's a lack

The bugs in unity are not the biggest problem people have with Ubuntu and Unity. Linux users of all types are used to buggy code.

No, the problem is Unity itself. It's a UI that just doesn't appeal to many Linux users. Some people love it. Sure. But a lot of us can't stand all of the crap and bloat that has infected user interfaces over the years. A lot of us want a simple and clean interface that stays out of the way. I want to be able to fire up a browser or three, my IDE, my email, a file manager, and once in a while a terminal or two. I want simple buttons and menus and a UI that lets me move windows around without all sorts of flashy special effects that get in the way. I want a couple of "desktops" so that I can leave my development area as it is while I type up a document on a word processor.

I'm not running a tablet. I don't need my UI to act like one. I have a full keyboard and mouse and I'm doing real work with real programs. I want a simple interface that lets me do that. For me, Linux Mint gives me all of what was great about Ubuntu but with a UI that I can tailor to my liking. I fire up my desktop with MATE, which is still a little buggy, and I get things done.

If you like Unity, go ahead and use it. But for people who like KDE and the old GNOME 2.x UI, Ubuntu has driven itself into irrelevance.

all due respect, i am running 10.10 netbook remix (first test of unity), and i currently have 3 browsers open, 3 terminals, a photo-editing app (darktable is pretty damn good these days) which i compile myself, plus skype, and occasionally dosbox'd doom2 and carmageddon.

the interface will get out of your way if you hit f11.

just sayin'. unity is certainly not perfect, but i use the sidebar more often than not. some stuff i'll launch from a terminal.

all due respect, i am running 10.10 netbook remix (first test of unity), and i currently have 3 browsers open, 3 terminals, a photo-editing app (darktable is pretty damn good these days) which i compile myself, plus skype, and occasionally dosbox'd doom2 and carmageddon.

the interface will get out of your way if you hit f11.

just sayin'. unity is certainly not perfect, but i use the sidebar more often than not. some stuff i'll launch from a terminal.

If you like Unity, great. Use it. But for a lot of us, we don't want to have a side bar. We don't want all of these tablet like "features". We don't want to have to hit F11 for the UI to get out of the way. We want the UI to be out of the way as a matter of design. So for us, Ubuntu is irrelevant. But that doesn't mean you have to do what we do.

How come you refer to single people who like Unity, and you say 'we' when referring to those who don't? As far as I can tell, from Ubuntu IRC channels, people who are so troubled by Unity are in minority. Very loud minority.

If you don't like it, there's XFCE for you - it has been branded as the 'proper' DE by Torvalds himself.

For me, Unity allows for less clutter, faster access to files and software, more real estate. What it could do, is use Mutter instead of Compiz - it's faster and less bloated. (Gnome

Have you noticed that Unbuntu has been overtaken by other distros? End users are speaking, and Gnome developers are not listening. I am not the first to notice.

Why Isn't GNOME Listening?

What has GNOME learned from user reactions to GNOME 3? Apparently, only how to ignore feedback....

In fact, GNOME appears so little interested in feedback that Day simply turned off comments after 115 had been posted. The comments were not particularly hostile -- some were favorable and almost all of them polite and informed -- but the comments were cut off, despite the obvious eagerness for discussion.

No, because it hasn't. On distrowatch, mint has caught up with ubuntu, but Distrowatch has a niche public of linux geeks. For the general public, ubuntu is more well known than all other linux distros combined. Try google trends "linux ubuntu" versus "linux mint". Or take a look at this article:
http://www.starryhope.com/ubuntu-most-popular-linux-distro/ [starryhope.com]. ubuntu gets twice as much google queries as the other top 9 distributions *combined*.

You're right that it hasn't been overtaken but it has lost a lot of ground. It will most likely lose more as people like myself will not be installing it for family and friends anymore. The last few installs I have done are linux mint.

On distrowatch - which is by no means the sole place that people go to get downloads of their favorite distro - Ubuntu has lost ground to Mint, but it's still #2. Fedora is still a distanat 3rd, followed by OpenSuse, Arch, Debian, Centos and so on. But I do agree w/ you that it will lose more ground, as it has abandoned not only Gnome2 but KDE as well, and is likely to drop support for Xubuntu and Lubuntu in future, going by their trends. Also, if they have decided that their only future is on servers an

The funding amounted to paying one single Canonical employee to work specifically on Kubuntu.

Kubuntu is remaining an official Ubuntu variant and will continue to be updated by the community. Moreover, bugs to the KDE package (which is part of the main repository) will continue to be fixed by anyone at Canonical, and patches will continue to be sent upstream.

Well, I have Kubuntu on my main system that I'm using now and on two laptops rarely used, but still relevant. I have Mythbuntu on my daughters netbook with MythTV stripped out since it frustrated me and XBMC in its place. Sounds silly but it works great. Currently the only thing I have running Linux Mint is my netbook, which I actually use all the time when I'm on the go, I got a buggy KDE issue I had trouble resolving and instead of just deleting my config files and starting over on KDE only (my usual s

>I have Mythbuntu on my daughters netbook with MythTV stripped out since it frustrated me and XBMC in its place.

Holy shit, I'm not the only one doing this! I also have a Mythbuntu install that I re-molded into an XBMC system because myth was becoming an unreliable pain in the arse, and I didn't need any of the PVR features.

I thought I was the only one running such a weird XBMC system, yet I have a fellow crazy out there doing the same thing! *BROFIST*

I can speak for myself and agree with you, mostly. I used Ubuntu 10.04 for a long time (mostly with Gnome, a little bit with KDE) and kept a partition available to try out the latest and greatest Ubuntu. They were never as good as 10.04. I figured they introduced Unity right after the LTS edition because they wanted a couple years to get it right before the next LTS (12.04). Unity always struck me as pretty slick and simple, but not quite "done" as far as usability was concerned. I was (and still am ever so

I did exactly the same thing. Once I heard that KDE was done, I grabbed the RC for Linux Mint (KDE) and haven't looked back. I even burnt my dad an ISO and told him how to backup his data, and install Mint instead of Kubuntu. And he's been using Kubuntu since '08. I won't recommend Ubuntu for anyone's systems anymore, and I used to do it *a lot*.

Yup. I've done exactly the same thing, and also switched to Mint. As of the latest release, Unity became the only UI supported without having to hack the shit out of the thing. I gave up, and I'm not going back. I tried unity for a while, but decided it was a terrible UI for a desktop. Linux Mint seems a good alternative, so why not?

So goodbye Ubuntu, it's been a good 6 years or so, but this is where I get off the bus. I really great improvement over Redhat many years ago, but if it's Unity or the Hig

Version 11+ seems to be dumbing down the OS much like Windows exists today. I understand they want to appeal to a greater number of users but, in my opinion, it's a step in the wrong direction for Ubuntu.

I'm running 10.04 LTS, and will continue to do so for a while. Most likely, the two PCs with the gnome interface will be upgraded to use xfce (i.e. Ubuntu 10.04 will become Xubuntu 12.04 LTS). One of our PCs already uses Xubuntu 10.04 LTS, so it will be a straight upgrade. I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 on a VM, and it sucks; I've also installed Linux Mint (menu sucks and can't be avoided), Suse (menu and other stuff sucks), etc. on VMs, and the only one which has a chance of supplanting Ubuntu is one of th

I'm on 11.10 now after stalling at 10.10 until about a month ago. I figured GNOME 2.0 is on the way out so I'd eventually have to get used to some other environment.

I gave Unity a shot, but it was too slow. Unity 2D is pretty snappy and not too bad, but it's really meant only for people who run one application at a time. I don't so it was always getting in my way. I couldn't stand Kubuntu and Lubuntu felt awkward.

But Xubuntu is most definitely a viable option even if it is a step down from GNOME 2.x.

I would have settled on XFCE, but discovered to my surprise that GNOME Shell with extensions gives you 95% of everything GNOME 2.0 did and has almost the same look and feel. It's what I'm using now and I'd rather move to Debian than give it up (if Ubuntu stopped supporting it).

So I'd suggest to take the plunge and upgrade. You have at least two viable options awaiting you.

I mostly like it too. Especially love the top menu bar; gives me extra vertical space in every app almost for free. I haven't met anybody in real life who thought Unity was a bad idea either.

Suspect this is a "greasy wheel" kind of thing, where those who are dissatisfied are loud and visible on places like slashdot, while most users have nothing much to complain about and keep silent. And most complaints really are about configurability, not basic functionality. A decent tool to do all the typical config changes people want would go a long way towards solving the issues for many of those people.

My only complaint really is Compiz, not Unity. Should use something more stable and less resource intensive.

I was really scared by all the stuff I read about it, and switched back to XFCE, which I have used on and off since back in the day.
I did some distro hopping, even though I've used Ubuntu since Warty, and I first tried Gnome Shell, since Gnome 2 was going away anyway. I tried really hard, but I just don't like Gnome Shell. Even adding extensions, it just doesn't feel right.
I finally gave up and re-installed 11.04 on my laptop and dove into Unity, and I don't see what the big deal is. It doesn't seem

Agree - have been running the unity releases in virtual box under 10.04 - but very little. They suck and so do all the alternatives I've seen so far. Sticking with 10.04 for as long as possible - when new versions of things I need won't run on the old one, not sure what I'll do.